Why can you sign up for an email list instantly but to unsubscribe it can take up to 10 days? Is there an actual technical reason or is it a sales tactic to try to make you reconsider?
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Having managed email servers before, the answer is going to be it kinda depends.
It’s mainly boiler plate kinda text that has become ubiquitous, just like automatic messages on phone systems talking about their higher than usual call volume. It may have had its origins back when removal from the send list required worker to manually remove you.
Most of the time as soon as you hit unsubscribe you will stop getting emails.
Some reasons you may continue to get email: Emails have already generated and are sitting in queue, the company wants to keep sending you emails for multiple days after you say you don’t want them, you only unsubscribed from a subset of the emails, they are spam emails and when you ‘unsubscribe’ they send you more emails since you have confirmed your email is active.
Couple of things to remember with technology is that it takes effort to maintain and keep current which a lot of companies don’t do very well ( or at all), and even if there is a technical capability to do something it might be something which the company has not set up or paid to have set up or managed, and much of what you read on websites or emails is not coming from the service owner (in this case email server owner) but rather something written by the website owner (owner meaning responsible person or vendor within or hired by a company).
And as noted above there are just a lot of little things in the world which exist not because of any particular cause but rather out of inirtia.
I absolutely love how this post has a top thread that explains: ‘In the EU, by law, you are unsubscribed immediately’
And then 10 threads from American IT types explaining why it takes 10 days for technical reasons…
There’s no technical restriction. Handling many requests is the main job of a database/server.
But since I’m from EU, I don’t know if other countries have a law, that urges to hold a newletter for 10 days?
But I guess this is just a bs strategy from the company itself.
It’s complicated because there’s a lot of different ways these could be handled. I’ve worked on a few different projects that ran e-mail campaigns and none of them used the same tools or processes for unsubscribing so it’s not going to be the same reason or the same timeframe from company to company. The simple answer is that it’s a reasonable buffer time for them to react and remove your email from whatever systems they are using.
Worked as lead for a company that included email newsletters/advertising along with a “payment” and “store handling”.. all bundled up.
I specifically worked on the gateway and integrations with banks, but i touched the marketing a handful of times:
1) on unsub a job would fire to remove you, this ran every 15 min or so and would go through the queue.
2) even if you were removed, the campaigns already processed and scheduled would have your email in them.
3) given the insane volume we’d send, when a campaign was scheduled we’d have microservices proccess this, which means that the microservice would not make a call to the DB for your email, or’wed nuke the db with millions of calls for every campaign going out.
4) so, despite your email being removed from our DB, pending campaigns still had it.
5) pending campaigns might span the next 24 hours or so, we would not proccess them more than that in advance. Generally speaking only a few hours though, depending on volume (clients wanted email to go out at xx:xx sharp, so the scheduler would make sure all of it is ready to be sent then and not have to throttle itself for db lookups etc)
10 day thing — as others have said, to cover our ass. Sometimes emails would get stuck and be sent later etc.. we’d have you out within 2-3 hours usually, 24hrs worst case, but if we are allowed 10, why promisse less?
Fun Fact: when you unsub from an email, the requierment never stated it has to be from our SYSTEM. A lot of times when you unsub you’d unsub from the *list* by default, but from the whole system, youd have to work for it a bit to find it 😛
Also, although you unsub, there was never an implied rule that we had to delete your email or it was never enforced, emails were kept and sold off… we also had statistics on each email on how often you open and click on shit, the ones that did were worth way more.
Note: i detested these practices, hence why i rarely touched this system other than to integrate the efforts into the payment system/store. I have long quit that company. The marketing dept was absolute cancer and everything they tried to do was so anti-consumer it made me sick.. like hiding the button on upsells to make customers frustrated and just do it, or simply do it by accident.. (big green button Accept, small ass decline hidden somewhere, no X in the corner). Fake sales.. taking too long to checkout and thinking.. click now and get 20% off… Mouse going towards the right corner of the page.. “WAIT.. here’s a once in a lifetime offer”. Thinking youre buying this for 66% off.. nono.. it’s 3 payments.. but it’s not obvious. They would specifically send shit back and ask my team to revamp them because they were too easy to cancel, or to easy to opt out, or too easy to understand :(…
Protip: if the UI is confusing and convoluted, run. It’s by design.
I do not miss that job…
It’s complicated because there’s a lot of different ways these could be handled. I’ve worked on a few different projects that ran e-mail campaigns and none of them used the same tools or processes for unsubscribing so it’s not going to be the same reason or the same timeframe from company to company. The simple answer is that it’s a reasonable buffer time for them to react and remove your email from whatever systems they are using.
I wanna know why credit cards take up to a week for refunds, while taking my money is instant.
I absolutely love how this post has a top thread that explains: ‘In the EU, by law, you are unsubscribed immediately’
And then 10 threads from American IT types explaining why it takes 10 days for technical reasons…
Worked as lead for a company that included email newsletters/advertising along with a “payment” and “store handling”.. all bundled up.
I specifically worked on the gateway and integrations with banks, but i touched the marketing a handful of times:
1) on unsub a job would fire to remove you, this ran every 15 min or so and would go through the queue.
2) even if you were removed, the campaigns already processed and scheduled would have your email in them.
3) given the insane volume we’d send, when a campaign was scheduled we’d have microservices proccess this, which means that the microservice would not make a call to the DB for your email, or’wed nuke the db with millions of calls for every campaign going out.
4) so, despite your email being removed from our DB, pending campaigns still had it.
5) pending campaigns might span the next 24 hours or so, we would not proccess them more than that in advance. Generally speaking only a few hours though, depending on volume (clients wanted email to go out at xx:xx sharp, so the scheduler would make sure all of it is ready to be sent then and not have to throttle itself for db lookups etc)
10 day thing — as others have said, to cover our ass. Sometimes emails would get stuck and be sent later etc.. we’d have you out within 2-3 hours usually, 24hrs worst case, but if we are allowed 10, why promisse less?
Fun Fact: when you unsub from an email, the requierment never stated it has to be from our SYSTEM. A lot of times when you unsub you’d unsub from the *list* by default, but from the whole system, youd have to work for it a bit to find it 😛
Also, although you unsub, there was never an implied rule that we had to delete your email or it was never enforced, emails were kept and sold off… we also had statistics on each email on how often you open and click on shit, the ones that did were worth way more.
Note: i detested these practices, hence why i rarely touched this system other than to integrate the efforts into the payment system/store. I have long quit that company. The marketing dept was absolute cancer and everything they tried to do was so anti-consumer it made me sick.. like hiding the button on upsells to make customers frustrated and just do it, or simply do it by accident.. (big green button Accept, small ass decline hidden somewhere, no X in the corner). Fake sales.. taking too long to checkout and thinking.. click now and get 20% off… Mouse going towards the right corner of the page.. “WAIT.. here’s a once in a lifetime offer”. Thinking youre buying this for 66% off.. nono.. it’s 3 payments.. but it’s not obvious. They would specifically send shit back and ask my team to revamp them because they were too easy to cancel, or to easy to opt out, or too easy to understand :(…
Protip: if the UI is confusing and convoluted, run. It’s by design.
I do not miss that job…
I wanna know why credit cards take up to a week for refunds, while taking my money is instant.
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